It's embarrassing that Louisiana incarcerates a higher percentage of its residents than any other place in the world. If locking up so many -- 881 prisoners per 100,000 residents -- made us feel like the world's most secure people, one might be able to justify our state's incarceration obsession. But who among us is breathing easier? Who can argue that what we've been doing benefits us?

File photoRep. Joe Lopinto, R-Metairie

At the beginning of this legislative session, it appeared that Louisiana might go from worst to even worse. Gov. Bobby Jindal proposed selling state prisons in Allen, Avoyelles and Winn parishes to private operators, profiteers who would have been financially motivated to keep those prisons brimming with bodies.

However, a House committee voted 13-12 against the governor's plan June 6. The proposal failed to get out of the House Appropriations Committee but not because a majority seems troubled by Louisiana's overemphasis on incarceration. Instead, the 13 opponents appeared persuaded by those who look to their state-run, hometown prisons for stable employment. A private operator focused primarily on profit might slash the prison staff, and according to the testimony from the wife of a worker at Avoyelles Correctional Center, "Our community would not be able to handle the flood of unemployed people."

Louisiana will never shed its distinction as the world's most eager jailer so long as lawmakers, local officials and nearby residents treat prisons as job generators. Still, it's far better for the state to keep control of its prisons than to sell them off to for-profit corporations. Such ownership would be problematic even if no jobs were lost.

The number of people imprisoned in Louisiana has doubled in 20 years. In 2009, the state sent 17,223 people to prison, and 82 percent of them, more than 14,000, were nonviolent offenders. During the same 20-year period that the state's prison population doubled, the cost of incarcerating a prisoner actually tripled.

Rep. Joe Lopinto, R-Metairie, sponsored two bills this session that -- at least as originally written -- may have reduced the state's prison expenses by $328 million over 10 years. House Bill 416 proposes to reduce the amount of time nonviolent, non-sex offenders have to spend locked up before they're eligible for parole. House Bill 414 would have allowed prisoners to more quickly accumulate so-called "good time" and be released from prison. The Pew Center on the States estimates that such a change by itself would save the state $253 million over 10 years.

But the Louisiana Sheriff's Association put the lid on that. The state often pays local jails to house state prisoners, and the state's sheriffs are adamant about holding on to that money. So Lopinto's House Bill 414 became watered down so that now all it does is make the "good time" statutes easier to understand.

That's a shame. But the sheriffs' interference makes plain how intractable our problem is. The state's step toward a more rational and humane prison policy is thwarted by law enforcement officials who hear the clanging of shackles as the ringing of a cash register.

The $75 million over 10 years that would have been saved with earlier paroles only passed the House after it was amended to require that those savings not be applied elsewhere but be kept within the state prison system. The bill would have been better for Louisiana without that amendment, but it's still good as is. It's a move in the right direction.

Lawmakers might never address our retrograde prison policies out of compassion for prisoners and their families, but maybe one day they'll concede that our prison fixation is costing us too much money.